Like Richmond, Lebanon’s capital city Beirut is still grappling with the legacy of civil war. Unlike those in Richmond, though, many of Beirut’s current residents lived through the most recent civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990. The political structure that exacerbated the tensions of the war still exists. Lebanon’s 18 official sect affiliations organize political representation, access to government services, and much of social life, largely as they did before the war.

The Beit Beirut house

Debates about reconciliation and commemoration co-exist with immediate concerns about ongoing rebuilding and preservation efforts, contemporary politics, and even, for some families, with lingering questions about the disappearance of loved ones. As a result, the attempt to identify some sort of collective memory is fraught.

The International Center for Transitional Justice notes that, “The civil war is not documented in school history books, and young people are often actively discouraged from discussing it in school.” I heard this concern echoed by friends and fellow educators in Beirut and ascribed to the difficulty of politicians’ and community leaders’ coming to narrative consensus about the war.

Without a shared academic curriculum or national narrative commemorating the war, Beirut’s artists and designers play a key role in visualizing memory and linking their history with the present. My time in Lebanon last month coincided with the seventh annual Beirut Design Week.

The program, which ran from June 22 through 29, showcased the work of local artists, designers, writers, and activists. Begun in 2012, Beirut Design Week (BDW) now offers more than 150 exhibits, lectures, temporary public art pop ups and performances, and interactive community events, drawing at least 25,000 visitors per year, according to the organizers’ calculations.

The theme of this year’s BDW was “Design and the City.” It called for contributors and audience members alike to, “Consider design’s transformative role in conceiving of the urban space in such ways that express our needs, desires and dreams as inhabitants of the city.”

Fleeting Memories exhibit

While BDW exhibits explored a range of topics, the war’s legacy echoed throughout artists’ work and even through the exhibition sites themselves. The exhibits I attended cautioned against both remaining beholden to and ignoring history. Instead, they looked for ways that design and public art could mediate between the past and present.

Some pieces explicitly took up the impact of war reconstruction efforts. The BDW exhibit “Fading Memory” was created by the organization Architects for Change and was installed in Zico House, a formerly private home built in 1935 in the Sanayeh District. Architects for Change called Zico House a model of “adaptive reuse.”

In their introduction to the exhibit, they argued that Beirut has been negatively impacted by “the boom of foreign gentrification” in which developers from outside Beirut rebuild without considering the city’s culture and history. The Beirut Souks, for example, once the site of local trade in fabrics, spices, and other goods, now more closely resemble Short Pump. The renovation was spearheaded by a private real estate company called Solidere, which came under fire for its connections to the Hariri family (Rafik Hariri was a former prime minister of Lebanon who was assassinated in 2005; his son Saad currently holds the same position) and its willful erasure of civil war history in Beirut’s downtown.

Timeless Tiles exhibit

To challenge that kind of development, Architects for Change turned Zico House into a space visibly flooded by memory. Artists created an imagined former resident of the house, a young boy whose recollections of home—“the rubber tree roots that broke through our tiles and became part of our house,” for example—were written on walls and hung from trees.

As visitors wound their way up Zico’s steep stairwell, they were invited to describe their own feelings about Beirut’s past, present, and future in a single word on tiles which were then added to a rooftop mosaic (one respondent’s three answers: “Raw, tragic, fragile”). Once on the rooftop, signs marked the former locations of buildings that were since demolished by war or by rebuilding, as cranes and constructions workers labored across the street.

Before the war, Beit Beirut, another BDW site, functioned as the Barakat House does now. It was designed by Lebanese architect Youssef Afandi Aftimos in 1924. Because of the building’s position on the dividing line between East and West Beirut, it became a sniper post and saw heavy fighting.

The Beit Beirut house as it stands now

Today, Beit Beirut’s façade is pockmarked with bullet holes and worn down by fire. The casual observer might assume that she’s looking at a condemned building. Inside, though, new metal supports bolster the structure, the paint is fresh, and renovators have installed a modern auditorium and office spaces.

On the ground floor of Beit Beirut, a permanent exhibit describes the former photography business, Photo Mario, that was located at this address before the war. Curator Mona El Hallak describes the project as essential to Beit Beirut’s efforts as a “Museum of Memory.” Negatives and images uncovered from the debris after the war hang from the walls. Additional boxes of photos encourage viewers to pick one and attempt to locate the person in the image, drawing the audience into the work of reconciliation.

Project Mario at Beit Beirut

In her work on Beit Beirut, it’s clear that El Hallak sees memory as not only the attempt to clarify and understand the past, but as a way to navigate Beirut as it is now, a city informed by a long history of art, culture, business, and, yes, violence. The BDW-specific exhibit at Beit Beirut this summer continued that effort. Inside a building marked by what El Hallak calls “war architecture,” urban design researchers mapped 2018 Beirut based on the perception of migrant delivery drivers, the diminishing presence of the Beirut River, and interactive surveys that, in Jimmy Elias’s “Multiple City” project, uses feedback from the audience to “translat[e] subjective emotions and experiences into narratives that contribute to a better comprehension of cities and one’s own life within the city.”

Richmond and Beirut are nowhere close to identical cities, and what works for Beirut as it continues working toward a future that engages a legacy of violence and deep divide will not necessarily be true for Richmond. But with the Monument Avenue Commission Report’s recent emphasis on partnering with the local arts community to envision new possibilities for commemoration in Richmond, Beirut Design Week is a useful reminder that the work of navigating the past and envisioning the future should be creative, intentional, collaborative, a bit messy, and always open to the public.

All photos by Katie Logan

*This article was made possible in part by support from the VCU Global Education Office.

After a long, heated debate, change became the chosen path for Richmond today. According to the Monument Avenue Commission, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney officially recommended the removal of the Jefferson Davis Monument today from Monument Avenue.

“Of all the statues, this one is most unabashedly Lost Cause [sic] in its design and sentiment,” the commissioners wrote in the report.

The board includes Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum, and Sarah Driggs, author of “Richmond’s Monument Avenue,” among others who look to direct the River City away from the ‘lost cause’ narrative many of these monuments represent. And with these monuments having origins in the Confederate ‘lost cause’ mythology and Unite The Right 2.0 coming up in August, the commission came as a much needed response for these controversial monuments.

After nearly one year of intensive study by the ten person commission, the group produced a 117 page report considering the future of Richmond’s Confederate statues, opening the floor to options including removal or relocation of the Confederate statues into a museum, or somewhere with proper context.

“In addition to taking on the responsibility of explaining the monuments that currently exist, I have also asked the commission to look into and solicit public opinion on changing the face of Monument Avenue by adding new monuments that would reflect a broader, more inclusive story of our city,” said Stoney in a statement one year ago. “That is our goal.”

The yearlong review examining the statues originally created to “determine how best to reconcile a particular landscape viewed as both sacred and profane,” is now figuring that for many of the statues, removal is the best option. Riding off the recent change to the Barack Obama Elementary school last month, this is the first of many necessary reforms to a city that has never truly healed.

The report also addresses the monuments of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart and Stonewall Jackson, President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis and Confederate commander Matthew Fontaine Maury with short term changes that will add context to the statues, such as proper signage. They will also consider the opening or expansion into a museum exhibit, where the monuments may be put into proper context that reflects the newly inclusive historical significance the city wants to promote.

The commission’s site currently offers an open forum for public discussion, but is also developing a mobile app and new film and video that looks to rewire the proper narrative about Monument Avenue that is “consistent and historically accurate.”

The Virginia Senate and House of Delegates spent the day before the start of Black History Month killing bill proposals that would allow local governments to move Confederate statues and rename Confederate-branded highways. They didn’t do it without their constituents’ support either.

Exit polls from last November’s elections show that 60 percent of Virginia voters feel Confederate statues and monuments should be left in place despite the fact 46 percent of those believed “displaying the monuments is offensive to African-Americans.” Such idiosyncratic attitudes towards history and race should come as no surprise in a state that from 1984 to 2000 celebrated Lee-Jackson-King Day, a holiday that simultaneously glorified Confederate icons and a Civil Rights hero.

Once again, this unwillingness to separate ourselves from our state’s Confederate past has placed us at odds with the necessity of forging a more inclusive and tolerant future.

As it exists today, Monument Avenue is not unlike a Revolutionary War memorial displaying only tributes to British generals; the status quo is untenable. This beloved boulevard presents us with an opportunity to rebrand our state following the terror in Charlottesville. We must take this chance and transform this space into a historic promenade which showcases the full spectrum of our complex past. We must expand the statues on Monument Avenue beyond the current five Confederates and local civil rights hero, Arthur Ashe, to include five more statues that would honor lynching victims, abolitionists, Union soldiers, the leaders of slave rebellions, and our hope for a better future.

In a state with so rich a history as ours, one need not dig too deep to find a wealth of stories that would provide the next generation with a broader, more inclusive picture of our state’s slave-owning past, its continued effects on modern society, and the power of individuals to overcome racism.

At the time of his lynching, Raymond Byrd was a 31-year-old husband and father of three, a veteran of World War I, and a gainfully employed farmhand in Wythe County. After an affair with his employer’s adult daughter led to the birth of an interracial child, Byrd was arrested on trumped-up charges of rape filed by the Commonwealth Attorney in the summer of 1926. While in police custody, Byrd was kidnapped from the Wytheville jail by a mob of masked men, shot, beaten, and dragged several miles before being hung from a tree branch.

Byrd’s fate was all too common in the South; 86 men were lynched between 1888 and 1926 in Virginia alone. After just 10 minutes of deliberation, the jury released the only suspect arrested for Byrd’s murder—a tragically typical outcome during this era in which only 0.8 percent of lynchings resulted in a conviction between 1900 and 1933. The national outrage prompted Virginia to pass the country’s first anti-lynching legislation in 1928 after repeated attempts at a federal law were blocked in Congress by the filibusters of Southern Democrats. To this day, there exists no federal law against lynching.

The Statues We Need:

Once called “the most radical white male who grew up in the antebellum South,” by history professor John d’Entremont of Randolph Macon, Moncure D. Conway spent his life as the black sheep of his patrician, slave-holding family. The grandson of a signatory of the Declaration of Independence and the nephew of a Supreme Court justice, Conway attended Harvard Divinity School and became a Unitarian minister in Washington, D.C. in 1854 where he served for two years until his removal for preaching his abolitionist beliefs.

After learning of the destruction of Fredericksburg in 1862, Conway returned to his family home on the Rappahannock to track down their slaves and personally led 30 of them to freedom in Ohio where he helped them establish a new settlement that came to be known as Conway’s Colony. As an abolitionist and radical feminist, Conway was far ahead of his time, even criticizing Abraham Lincoln for freeing the slaves without addressing the issue of equal rights; angered by the president’s lack of forethought, Conway wrote, “What will we do in 1962?”—correctly divining the Civil Rights Movement a century later.At the age of 17, Maria Lewis fled the Virginia plantation where she’d spent her entire life as a slave to escape to freedom. Rather than run, she disguised herself as a man, chose the name George Harris, and joined a whites-only unit, the 8th New York Calvary. At first enlisting was just a way to escape north, however, Lewis quickly fell in love with the life of a soldier, charging into battle on horseback with rifle and sword in hand. Lewis was not alone in fighting for her people’s freedom in disguise. She was one of roughly 750 women that waged war on the front lines in the same manner.”

After her unit took 500 men prisoner and captured 17 flags in one battle, this teenage black girl and former slave was one of the few “white men” chosen to present their unit’s winnings to Lincoln’s Secretary of War. Lewis left the army after two years of service to spend the rest of her life not as George Harris but rather in a similarly unheard of role at that time in America, that of a free black woman.“Here, before God, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!” bellowed John Brown after the murder of Presbyterian minister and abolitionist, Elijah Lovejoy, at the hands of a pro-slavery mob in 1837. The man who had been a simple shepherd, tanner, and father of 15 was transformed into the loudest advocate of armed insurrection as the only path by which to overthrow slavery in the United States. Frustrated by the pacificism of other abolitionists, Brown became a national figure during the Bleeding Kansas crisis of 1856 when he led volunteers into battle against pro-slavery militias to determine the territory’s future as either a free- or slave-state.

Three years later, Brown would lead a party of 22 to raid the military arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in hopes of initiating an armed slave revolt. After the Marines swiftly put an end to the raid, Brown was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. On the day of his execution, he mused, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land will never be purged away but with Blood. I had vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.” Brown’s wrong-headed raid escalated tensions on both sides, triggering southern talk of secession to preserve slavery as well as northern praise of him as a martyr for freedom.Mildred Loving, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were sentenced to a year in prison by the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1959 after they married. Their crime was miscegenation, the act of marrying outside of each of their racial groups. After the Lovings were sentenced and forced to move to the District of Columbia, Mildred wrote to then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy for help. He referred her case to the ACLU, and the landmark civil rights case of Loving v. Virginia began on its path to the Supreme Court.

In a unanimous 1967 decision which invalidated all race-based restrictions on marriage, the Supreme Court determined such prohibitions were unconstitutional—a finding that would undergird full marriage equality 48 years later. The Lovings spent the rest of their lives happily married, unwittingly serving as a testament to the power of love to conquer hatred. The final statue added to Monument Avenue must be of Mildred and Richard Loving—a statue to show us justice is inevitable and that love defies all prejudice.In those same exit polls from last November, only 30 percent of Virginia voters felt Confederate monuments defended slavery. Virginians are not alone in our misremembering of history; a 2017 survey found that only eight percent of high school seniors identified slavery as the cause of the Civil War. The removal of our Confederate statues is not only unpopular, but indeed morally wrong. The correct way to deal with the past is not to tear it down and hide it away. We must look our messy, ugly past straight in the face and examine the full spectrum of roles Virginians played in our history—from victims to perpetrators to those who give us hope for a brighter tomorrow.

If our goal as a society is racial reconciliation, then our unique burden as Richmonders must be to educate ourselves and others to embrace a complete and representative history of slavery and the Civil War.

Despite attracting only a few supporters and finding themselves stranded and seeking donations to get home, the trio behind the Lee Monument rally are planning a comeback. Organizers of the failed rally last weekend Tara Brandau, Tom Crompton, and Judy Crompton have posted a Facebook event called “Protect The General Robert E. Lee Monument – Round 2”, originally planned for December 2nd. Since our first report, they’ve changed the date to December 9th.

From CSA II Facebook Event Page

The event will conflict with the Richmond Christmas Parade, which takes place starting at 10:15 AM parallel to Monument Avenue on Broad Street. As of press time, the rally has 16 rsvps; it reached 70 for the previous event, but only 3-4 people joined the organizers. They were dwarfed by an estimated 400 counter-protesters, consisting of local advocates, church groups, the Richmond Peace Education Center, and an out-of-state Black Lives Matter chapter from New York.

Brandau and the Cromptons claim again to have been invited by a Virginia chapter of the CSA II organization the Cromptons founded, but we’ve been unable to verify that the chapter exists outside of a small Facebook group administered by the Cromptons.

The CSA II has posted a photo with a caption suggesting a heavily-armed presence; “Ready for round two and doing it our way this time, Guns Up”. In response, local residents have harsh words for the trio on the event page, reproduced below.

As of 5:30 pm the organizers of this supposed rally have locked their event page, banned certain people including RVA Mag’s journalists, and removed any negative comments from residents living in Richmond.

Saturday’s neo-Confederate rally is shaping into a larger event, with an announcement from Black Lives Matter of Greater New York (BLM NY) that they’ll be attending. The group is seeking donations via GoFundMe to purchase protective gear for the rally.

We’re going to Richmond, Va to counter-protest the continuous terrorism, hate, and bigotry in America. There’s a rally taking place September 16, 2017 to defend the Robert E. Lee statue and to promote the Confederacy. In the name of freedom, liberation for Black people/POC, and Heather Heyer (the brave soul that was murdered by a white supremacist) we will continue to fight!

Although CSA II: The New Confederate States of America, the group behind the rally has explicitly disinvited the violent protesters that appeared in Charlottesville, they are planning to open carry, and local residents have expressed concern about the rally leading to violence, unintentional or not. “We are going to Richmond Virginia tomorrow night to protest white supremacists on Saturday morning. This is another protests around the statue similar to Charlottesville,” wrote Hawk Newsome, BLM NY President, in a Facebook post from earlier today. The group announced their plans to attend last night, marking one of the first significant national counter-protest group coming.

This announcement comes as the Richmond Police Department have expanded the no-parking zones previously announced and issued a statement asking citizens to report any suspicious activity to 911 and sign up for the municipal codeRED alert system. They also advised locals to stay clear of Lee monument this Saturday owing to the potential for violence. The RPD is holding a press conference at the police training academy at 3:30 PM today and a community meeting at the First Baptist Church on Monument Avenue tonight at 6 PM.

On June 22nd, Mayor Levar Stoney announced a commission “to help the city redefine the false narrative of the Confederate statues that line Richmond’s grandest boulevard.” This announcement was hardly shocking – in a sense, it had been coming for decades – but it was significant for the mayor to publicly assert that some of Richmond’s most famous landmarks are part of a false narrative.

The statues are often referred to as part of “our history,” but what part of our history do they actually memorialize? RVA Mag asked historical experts throughout the US to find out.

It’s fair to say that most Virginians learn a complex historical narrative from a young age. Alongside the standard talk of Lincoln, Grant, and the Fourteenth Amendment, Virginians get a healthy dose of Southern perspective and rhetoric about states’ rights. If you grew up in the Commonwealth between 1984 and 2000, you have also celebrated Lee-Jackson-King Day while the rest of the country was simply celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – the Commonwealth still observes Lee-Jackson Day every January.

Robert E. Lee. Photo by Virginia Historical Society

Regardless of how people might feel about the continued presence of Confederate symbols, most are not shocked when they see the naval flag or hear Lee mythologized over his gentlemanly charm or duty to defend Virginia. Even in the face of historical evidence, which indicates he was exceptionally cruel to his slaves, the idealized figure of Lee as a conflicted Virginia patriot persists.

However nuanced our versions of them may be, these men are still enshrined on Monument Avenue. Putting aside, for now, the question of whether they should remain there, it is worth the time to explore the real meaning of these statues and how their history is understood today.

Matt Karp, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University and author of This Vast Southern Empire, a new book emphasizing the role slaveholders played in government prior to the Civil War, argues that the statues are more a product of Reconstruction’s failure than a desire to memorialize the war itself. The first statue didn’t even go up on Monument Avenue until 1890, 25 years after Appomattox and 20 years after the death of its subject – General Robert E. Lee.

“By the late 1870s, the former planter class didn’t get back to where they were before the war,” said Karp. “But they had clearly won this struggle, and they had succeeded in marginalizing and defeating the forces that wanted to totally reconstruct the South. And these monuments are celebrations of that struggle.”

In celebrating Confederate heroes at the precise moment of Reconstruction’s failure, he argues, the monuments celebrate “the resumption of white rule.” Dozens of black representatives had been elected to Virginia’s General Assembly in the late 1860s and 1870s, but by 1900 the legislature was once again entirely white. Discriminatory voting laws and endemic racism in state government would keep it that way until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

Economic and social forces were also re-establishing something similar to slavery, according to Justene Hill, an Assistant Professor of African-American History at the University of Virginia.

“Slavery, by law, was made illegal, except in cases of being imprisoned,” she said. “But some of the same institutions were still implemented, in terms of a shift in the new South towards an agriculture based on African-American labor.” During the post-Reconstruction period, Hill argues, slavery, “transformed and was institutionalized in other ways.”

Through discriminatory laws, an agricultural system that kept many former slaves poor and beholden to white landowners, and a criminal justice system that funneled freed slaves into prison and then profited from their labor, conditions that resembled slavery started to re-emerge in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century.

It’s not a coincidence, then, that the white ruling class chose this moment to erect statues to men who had embodied the pre-war power structure. While they had no illusions about bringing slavery back, Karp argues, the “first wave of Lost Cause memorializers” were very keen on the idea of a racial hierarchy.

“Nobody was still defending chattel slavery in the 1880s and 1890s when these monuments went up,” he said. “But what was still very active and very popular was the idea of white supremacy.”

Hill added that the rise of the monuments coincided with the violent reinforcement of this re-established status quo.

“When cities erected these statues it happened, interestingly, at the same time when there was an uptick in racial violence and particularly lynchings,” she noted. “And so these statues came to represent a form of white supremacy, to keep African-Americans in line and in check with regards to what their rights could be and how they could then project their rights in public.”

Historical records indicate that 83 African Americans were lynched in Virginia from 1882 until the practice died out – across the South, lynchings peaked in the 1890s.

It may be hard for many Virginians to imagine in 2017, given that Confederate symbols and statues have become part of our civic furniture, but a former slave watching the unveiling of the Lee statue in 1890 would have reason to see it as an implicit warning not to challenge the racial hierarchy.

Black Virginians knew that even an imagined offense could provoke their white neighbors to organize a lynch mob. The installment of a new statue honoring a slaveholding general was a clear sign that those in power sympathized more with the lynch mobs than with their victims.

When asked, none of the academics interviewed were in favor of summarily removing the statues.

“I’m leery about that, even though I have no illusions about what those monuments stood for in the minds of their makers, nor what the men themselves thought about the world,” said Karp. “I’m very leery of shortcuts and end-runs that feel very satisfying but A) don’t really address lingering social questions in a material way and B) suggest that history can be fixed by tearing this stuff down.”

VMI cadets marching down Monument Avenue, 1916

The consensus was that, while the statues do skew our reading of Virginia’s history, tearing them down will not, on its own, solve the problem. Hill claimed that the removal of monuments in other cities proved a poor substitute for actual, difficult conversations about slavery’s continuing impact on society.

“I think that this conversation is long overdue, which is why in New Orleans, for example, they had to remove the statues under the cloak of darkness,” she said. “The fact that we as a society have waited so long, I think, belies a bigger conversation about our discomfort with really interrogating the history of race and slavery in this country.”

That discomfort may drive the reluctance to acknowledge the problem posed by Monument Avenue. The statues themselves help avoid discussions of race and slavery by turning the focus toward generals and battles, rather than slaves and their masters.

Professor Barrymore Bogues of Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice points out that people rarely discuss the actual experiences of slaves during the war, even though they were far from passive bystanders. Examining these narratives, like examining the histories of the monuments themselves, is painful work, but it may be the only way to make true progress.

“The question of statues and their removal is really a question of what it is that we want to remember,” said Bogues. “But more importantly, what is it that we need to remember? Do we need to remember lost causes, or that we have a history in which things happened, in which black people played a role?”

Regardless of whether the commission finds a satisfactory resolution to the monument debate, Richmond needs to have more of these difficult conversations.